The cultural politics of flickr tags
23 05 2006
This is from the preliminary stages of a little textual analysis experiment I’m thinking about designing. It’s to do with the way that ‘architectures of information’ invite particular forms of subjecthood, particular constellations of values, and particular kinds of participation, and those forms of participation in turn work to shape the architecture in their own image.
See also race, age, work, identity, ethnic and gender.
There are obvious limitations to which of these terms ‘make sense’ as flickr tags in the first place, and in what ways, but still, interesting results so far. ‘Identity’ and ‘work’ to my mind are the most interesting - and the least silly in terms of what we might reasonably expect users to tag their photos with.
And more deterministically, Truscello says: “architecture, whether it refers to buildings or databases, constructs subject positions through the spatialization of power.”
Anyway, what other forms of ‘clustery goodness’ should I try?
[update]: speaking of the construction of subject positions and the spatialization of power and GoogleZon/Silicon Valley values (and the vanity of following your own incoming search strings): earlier today this Google search string spat this post out as the top-most result. My apologies to the searcher, who stayed for precisely 0 seconds.
the problem with tagging architecture is that you can’t easily say what is the designed structure of information. At least not so easily as you could say when you speak about semantic web. So the question is “what are we observing” when we observe clustered tags in flickr?
Anyway I’m doing some similar research observing flickr cluster about Europe and European Union. Anyway I’ll discuss flickr as a research tool at the IVSA conference that will be hold in Urbino this summer. Maybe could be a good opportunity to come in Italy.